Hi All – This is a quick notice to let you all know that I’m migrating this blog to a new site. The new Blog/News site can be found at: http://SedonaCyberLink.com. It is also a WordPress backend with a front end designed by Gabfire. I have a lot more design flexibility with this site, and it allows me to combine my news feeds, blogging, and corporate websites into a single platform.

I hope you visit us there….there are many links to your various social networking sites, and an RSS feed button. And, I will have several opportunities for advertisers to post banners as well.

Please bear with me for the next week or so while I download and configure a few more Plugins to make it even more functional!

Karl Marx is usually credited with coining the term “capitalism” to describe the economic system of our age. The prior system, feudalism, accorded power and wealth to those that controlled the land. Marx observed that power and wealth had shifted to those that controlled capital. The irony of describing today’s economy as capitalistic is that for Marx capitalism, as he thought of it, was only a small portion of the overarching system that really set him off.

The plain fact is that prosperity and productivity had nothing to do with Marx’s ire. The Communist Manifesto contains arguably the greatest paean to the productivity of the new system ever penned to paper:

“The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to agriculture and industry, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even an intimation that such productive power slept in the womb of social labor?”

Wow! After that you would think Marx would be wild about the bourgeoisie reign. Note that Marx did not refer to a capitalist system, but to actions and accomplishments of a class of people. Indeed they were an entirely new class of people eschewing the status of birth for the status of wealth, relentlessly pursuing profit.

This all suggests something deeper and broader for Marx’s negative sentiments found in his manifesto. In what I believe is the greatest paragraph in all of English nonfiction prose, the Communist Manifesto contains the answer. Having read both Capital by Marx and Conditions Of The Working Class In 1844 by Engels, I believe the following ideas are from Marx, but the words were Engels’:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

This is powerful stuff. The context of this text embedded in the Communist Manifesto is clearly negative in its thrust. Yet, a free market objectivist like me can only be moved by its eloquence, perception and accuracy. Unlike Marx, I revel in this new state of affairs. Unfortunately most are not unlike Marx.

In the narrowest sense, Marx preferred the old status based system because it favored lazy intellectuals like him. Later in the Communist Manifesto he notes that professionals, intellectuals, artists etc. merge into the working class and:

“[L]ive only so long as they find work, and … find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

Heaven forbid! Intellectuals, professionals and artists have to actually work for a living providing something people actually want and for which they will pay. Dare I say it, they must be commercial!!!

More broadly and fundamentally, Marx strikes a deeply harmonious cord with the evolutionary base of the human psyche. The new system, which the word “capitalism” does not fully encompass, is as much about actions and change as it is about a market economy, laissez faire and globalization. Marx was the first to fully understand this. He was the canary in the coalmine of the industrial revolution noting that the new system brought constant, even accelerating change.

Humans are wired to detest change. For all of the history of life on earth change was always bad. Organisms strive to be in a place where they met their needs, and once there any new development was surely negative. This is why, despite the colossal productive prosperity all around us we are far from content, let alone happy.

We live in The Age Of Angst! Ours is the only truly unique age in all of history – future as well as past. Until yesterday, from a historical perspective, a person would be born, live and die in a world essentially unchanged. That is why ancient structures were built to last forever (and more than a few succeeding in that aim).

Therefore the correct word to describe the past’s prevailing world view was not cyclical, but circular. Details differed here and there, but everything eventually returned to its original position. Pestilence and war commonly caused havoc. Technology caused minor lifestyle differences. The world remained the same.

That world view has been obliterated. In my lifetime the world has been turned upside down and inside out not once, but going on twice. Historical processes that changed fundamental cultural traits like manners, dress, attitudes toward sex and women, marriage, family and religion used to take centuries and now take decades or less.

It is more than ideas and opinions that are swept away. We are in the only age where there is no cultural consensus about anything. People are making it up as they go along because there is no cultural point of reference. Until our age the notion of a fulfilling marital relationship or being a good parent had no meaning. You rose at dawn, worked like hell all day, hopefully ate afterword and dropped of exhaustion at dusk. There was not time or energy for anything else.

In a few hundred years or so humanity will probably sort this all out bringing a close to this only real age of change. We need a new word or phrase to denote this system impelling accelerating change referred to by Marx as the reign of the bourgeoise. The concept of the free market is incomplete. Liberty and law may be better. Any suggestions?

The chaos in the L.A. streets was artistically depicted in the recent film about poverty in America: The Soloist. It is the tale of an L.A. newspaper reporter that takes an interest in a homeless person that is a gifted musician. In the course of the film, the reporter – played by Robert Downey, Jr., takes an honest look at the issue of poverty in America through his friendship with the homeless man, played by Jamie Foxx. Director Joe Wright tackles this issue with sensitivity and grit, while at the same time, avoiding the trap of either idealizing or demonizing those who have found themselves in this situation. I bring this movie up not with the intent of reviewing the film, but rather as a pointer to a vehicle that viewers can use to become more aware of this pressing problem, not only in America, but around the world.

Rarely will you see an essay that merges the theme of an esoteric economic theory with a socio/political issue like poverty as depicted in a recent movie, but here you will see it. This is because the two issues are intricately linked.

The July 18th-24th issue of The Economist had two good articles on how the entire discipline of economics is going through a major overhaul as a result of the 2008 financial meltdown. Macroeconomics in particular has been largely discredited; in large part because the models are too simplistic and their usefulness for guiding public policy has been severely compromised. The inability of the current models to predict the credit and liquidity conditions after the failure of Lehman Brothers has given pause to many people who were so convinced they were right. Similarly, in the field of financial economics the much touted Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) is now undergoing great scrutiny. Sophisticated methods of financial engineering emerged from EMH, many of which were implicated in the meltdown. So called institutional frictions led to certain inefficiencies that challenged the very basis of the model. These frictions that emerged in the form of toxic assets in the syndicated mortgage lending market were indeed inefficient.

Not only that, there was more than just the theoretical debris. There has been a form of human debris that is represented by the increasing number of unemployed people and people living under conditions of poverty. And, this is occurring not only in the U.S., but worldwide, with some countries hit harder than others.

It is within this context that the new conditions for thoughtful living takes place in the world. Certain economists, like Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing models that reflect both behavioral and rational points of view. A behavioral approach is one that reflects the actions of irrational human beings, those that use herding behaviors, like those we have seen on Wall Street and on Main Street over the past few months. A rational approach is the straw man that has been used throughout the history of economics to characterize a value-seeking individual that acts in their own self-interest to maximize profits. Andrew Lo’s work is premised on the idea that humans use trial and error as a basic decision-making tool. It is within this context that institutional friction and societal learning takes place. This new “adaptive markets hypothesis” is one that takes into account the imperfections of the system; in the case of the world economy now, that includes the human debris.

The metaphor of a homeless musician playing Beethoven on the streets is an apt one for our time. He wrote his 9th Symphony at a time of great upheaval in the socioeconomic context of 18th century Europe. I wonder if the musicians of our time will be remembered by those living on the streets in the future. Don’t you think it would be better if we could build a society where everyone had a room to go to, like the Jamie Foxx character ends up doing in the movie?

The International Securities Exchange (ISE) has issued a proposal for reform to the the U.S. securities markets. The proposal is based on the premise that there are currently significant overlapping areas and regulatory gaps between the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

They are proposing a new risk-based framework that includes 3 components:

The policy mantra in leading up to the planned December, 2009 Copenhagen negotiations on a global climate agreement has been “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This refers to the important inclusion of several critical fast-growing and large emerging markets in the agreement; unlike that of the Kyoto Protocol. Climate change analysts are looking forward to the reopening of genuine talks on establishing emission caps; nonetheless, there is some trepidation among many going into these talks about the role the current global financial crisis will play in moderating the outcomes. There is, however, an even more subtle, but potentially contentious item that could influence the outcome. Negotiators need to be aware of a subtle, but insidious threat lurking in the background that may sabotage any progress made in the negotiations. This is the impact of growing formal and informal forms of trade protectionism that has infected the public policy agenda in many countries since September, 2008.

In March, 2009, the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London issued an insightful eBook entitled ‘The collapse of global trade, murky protectionism, and the crisis: Recommendations for the G20’edited by Richard Baldwin and Simon Evenett (2009). There are a number of hard-hitting essays and recommendations to G20 leaders on how to avoid the protectionist tendencies that are creeping into public policies in response to the global financial crisis. It is a serious piece of scholarship written in record time in response to the events of the 4th quarter of 2008. Importantly, it includes an essay by Simon Evenett and John Whalley on how to resist what has come to be known as green protectionism. A working definition of green protectionism can be given as “the deliberate use of environmental policy initiatives to discriminate against foreign commercial interests, including subsidiaries of companies owned or headquartered abroad.”

A similar call to resist regulatory arbitrage was made by the World Bank in its recent report ‘Global development finance: Charting a global recovery’ (2009). They conclude that

“The international spillovers of the crisis in the financial area presently provide a powerful incentive for harmonization, because concerns over stability temporarily outweigh the urge to seek advantages for the ‘home team’.”

Standards Harmonization

Harmonization has been, in the financial and trade arenas, the driving force behind much of the progress made in the past 20 years to open markets and further progress in increasing efficiencies in global supply chains. This has had a significant effect on lifting millions of people throughout the world out of poverty. This is not to say that there is no inequality in incomes, or that the digital divide has not been widened. This is an issue that will be addressed in a separate essay. The issue here is how the optics of a ‘green’ agenda has given new impetus to those who seek to protect domestic markets at the expense of consumers and global trade. The progress made toward harmonization in trade and financial sectors is threatened now as more and more national governments install provisions in bailout legislation and crisis management initiatives that give preference to in-country procurement. Similarly, governments in many different regions are instituting higher tariffs and implementing other non-tariff measures to protect domestic industries.

And yet, harmonization of global emission standards and approaches to taxation of carbon inputs in production is, undoubtedly, a key objective of the Copenhagen negotiations. Indeed, harmonization of global environmental standards has been included in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), among others. And, the principles embodied in these multilateral agreements are seen in several regional agreements, notably, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But from a trade policy perspective, the environmental agreements that are seen to be least distorting are those that are preferable for a new Copenhagen Protocol.

Nonetheless, many critics of emission caps and global negotiations on climate issues claim that measures committed to by national governments within the context of climate change amelioration will impair business development and progress. This is a worn out argument that has been used for years in response to Kyoto Protocol pressures. But now, in the post 2008 financial crisis era, these arguments seem to have been given new impetus. However, the linkage of downturns in global trade, and the associated impacts to economies around the world to the deleterious effects of protectionist measures has rarely been made. It is these protectionist trends that threaten to take the planet back to a mercantilist regime as was practiced in the 1800s. And when trade protectionism is coupled with green technologies advocacy, a dangerous condition is set forth that can lead to a vicious downward spiral in the global situation.

It has been documented by the World Bank that since September 2008, governments around the world have proposed or enacted 78 different trade measures that are protectionist in intent. Furthermore, 17 of the G20 countries are included in the list of offenders. Importantly, this includes the United States where the global crisis had its genesis due to the syndication of risky mortgages. Don’t the critics of climate change talks see this more threatening form of regulatory arbitrage as a harbinger of a shrinking global system? Wouldn’t it make sense to address this problem as part of the climate change agenda? In this way the potentially contentious negotiations on emissions caps, technology subsidies, and/or tax offsets can be tackled from a proactive point of view within a win/win framework.

Climate Change Control and Retaliatory Actions

Carbon control techniques being discussed among climate changes specialists include a consumption tax and a production tax. Although the consumption tax is deemed to be fairer, calculating it is complicated by the complexity of global supply chains and rules of origin (RoO) in many countries. As a result, the fallback position is a carbon production tax. But, as Evenett and Whalley argue

“To offset this adverse effect on competitiveness some proponents, including the high-profile Lieberman-Warner bill that recently failed in the US Congress, have argued for the introduction of taxes on imports from those jurisdictions with lower carbon taxes. Ultimately, it is feared that unilateral and regional measures will induce defensive protectionist pressures that will manifest themselves in measures to limit imports to the detriment of trading partners in particular from those poorer countries, that to date have expressed less interest in reducing carbon usage” (pg. 94).

Indeed, defensive measures in the form of complaints filed with the WTO under the TBT provisions are up 9% in 2009; another form of quantitative proof that these concerns are more than conjecture.

Climate Change and Trade

Other than Evenett and Whalley, advocates of a global climate change agenda have not addressed the trade factor in the ongoing discussions leading up to Copenhagen 2009. The trade aspects, which include the need to address WTO Doha Round agenda items, as well as progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), must be seen systemically just as the earth’s atmosphere is being viewed. Importantly, the fact that over 3 billion people live on less than US$2/day should be taken into account as a key factor in moving forward (Prahalad, 2006).

This is where the antidote comes in. And it is coming from a most unlikely source; the grassroots movement known as the ‘fair trade’ movement. If the multi-dimensional human element (as defined so eloquently by Muhammad Yunas in his book ‘Creating a world without poverty: Social Business and the future of capitalism’ [2007]) is factored in, then alternative strategies can be formulated. These alternative strategies would take into account the need to foster social businesses that both meet a market efficiency goal while at the same time satisfying a social goal, that of productive employment for workers in the budding new ‘green’ manufacturing industries. However, these jobs may not necessarily be located in the countries that are now sounding the battle cry for supporting only their domestic industries. This could be a reason for easing trade restrictions and getting back on track with financial harmonization.

Alternatively, if business models guiding the development of technologies to implement programs for carbon capture and sequestration and/or alternative energies based on renewable resources must be built on the profit motive premise, then the pyramid-to-diamond transition argued so forcefully by C.K. Prahalad in his book ‘The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: Eradicating poverty through profits’ could guide public policy discussions (2006). His reference to the pyramid-to-diamond transition is his way of describing how, through focus on developing suitable products for those people living at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), while at the same time, building the infrastructure to support the productive growth of this sector, a large segment of the population can be lifted from poverty. In the context of climate change discussions, appropriately sized technologies based on renewable resources could offset some of the carbon emissions from the millions of people that still rely on coal and firewood burning for heat and cooking.

These two approaches to reducing global poverty rely on a harmonized trade and financial services regime; much like the one that was in place before September, 2008. And, although global trade has declined precipitously, and economies are shrinking on the order of several percentage points (as measured by gross domestic product [GDP]), free trade is not in total retreat. There is a solid foundation upon which to build.

Climate Change and Fair Trade

This is where a fair trade approach to production in carbon control and sequestration technologies can come into play. With a systematic approach to global climate change talks that guard against green protectionism and, at the same time, seek to enhance efforts to design appropriate energy sources for the BOP segment, whole new markets for products and services can be created. Importantly, with a premise that seeks as a primary goal to use climate change progress as a mechanism for empowering those people who will be most affected by the energy resources that will be used as substitutes for fossil fuels, the creative and entrepreneurial power of these individuals can be unleashed to help design systems for carbon capture.

This approach can help negotiators from becoming schizophrenic in the Copenhagen meetings; allowing them to avoid opposing protectionist measures to the financial crisis, while at the same time, advocating for policies that would limit imports on the basis of RoO or TBT.

How this will work is still a bit murky. It is, right now, just a germ of an idea. But, by voicing the potential for this nexus, it is my hope that techniques for merging climate change and trade policy with practical, implementable solutions can be formulated. Then the empowered people from all countries can become part of the global trading system, rather than sitting outside watching the sky get smoggier with each passing year.

No contentious issue has more agreement among economists than that trade protectionism is detrimental to all concerned. Yet no issue is less understood by the public and politicians. The typical claim is made that high wage countries cannot compete against countries where labor is exploited by low pay and terrible working conditions. By that reasoning California and New York cannot compete against Arkansas. In addition to huge wage differentials between California and Arkansas, there are no trade, legal, or language barriers to contend with. Therefore, according to arguments of trade protectionists, there should be massive outsourcing to Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi from California and New York. Obviously, this has not happened. Also, wages in Japan skyrocketed relative to US wages throughout the post war period with no effect on their huge trade surplus.The genesis of persistent trade imbalances has only a little to do with wages and working conditions. To understand why, we must start with the basics. When I get a haircut, I have established a trade deficit with my barber. He can take the money and buy something from me, buy something from someone else, or save the money. This same scenario can be aggregated to a nation as a whole. When we purchase clothing made in China, the Chinese have the same three choices as my barber. In recent decades the net of all such choices by citizens around the world outside the US has been to save much of the money earned through trade.
Now, having saved a chunk of the money earned through trade, our frugal foreigners must choose what to do with the dollars they have not spent. They can trade the dollars for other currencies, or they can invest those dollars in the US. The overwhelming choice has been to invest in the US because of the relative strength of our political economy. That is exactly equal to our trade deficit. As our economy weakens in combination with profligate monetary policies our currency will lose value.
Sideshows like currency devaluation, overvaluation and manipulation are irrelevant to our trade deficit. No amount of currency devaluation by our treasury will reduce our trade deficit as long as we spend and foreigners save. Our currency has plummeted over the past 40 years, sometimes so fast as to be on the verge of utter collapse, yet the trade deficit soared. The value of our currency is a sensitive barometer of the strength of our political economy and something that touches every one of us every day. It is insane to want that measure reduced in value.

Prior to WWI, as a debtor nation, our borrowing and spending was primarily for investment purposes (as in capital equipment). Today the trade deficit is for consumption. The consequences are very different. When we borrowed for investment our currency strengthened along with our economy because we were increasing our productive capital. Our borrowing for consumption means we have literally consumed – actually hocked – our productive capital.
Until now the effects of profligate money printing and extreme economy wide debt have been muted because foreigners have considered the US a great place to invest their savings, though at reduced exchange rates for our dollar. That is about to change.